"Callity is the speech analytics and QM tool we dreamed of developing"

For the past three years, insurance broker Julia has been using French software to monitor the quality and compliance of telephone sales. The use of this practice and the actions that can result from it can be a drug.

In the highly competitive insurance brokerage market, we are seeing the emergence of players who are primarily focused on growth, and others who are trying to reconcile growth and quality. Julia undoubtedly belongs to the second category. The broker recently joined Santiane, one of the fastest-growing players in the market.

Benjamin Dresner, Chairman and co-founder of Julia, still spends time listening to the conversations between prospective customers and his advisers. He sees new virtues in this exercise, which is made so much easier by the Callity software, and explains why.

Benjamin Dresner: I'm not a great believer in 100% online sales in our market. To advise on the right supplementary health insurance and now the other insurance products we offer, it's essential to find out the profile and expectations of the prospect, the future policyholder. We therefore devote considerable time and resources to training our advisers and sales staff, who work mainly by telephone.  This is all the more essential given that, after the first year of their policy, policyholder loyalty is highly correlated with the management of their policy AND the suitability of the insurance contract in place.

Right from the start of Julia's career, I've always spent time listening in on sales conversations, with almost surgical attention. This allows us to see how well trained they are, to hear the questions that prospects ask, the feedback that is given to these or to objections. Very quickly, we began to systematically listen to and transcribe these conversations, because reading is quicker than listening. A sales meeting can last an hour. So we set out to develop a tool, until we discovered Callity.

The quality of the transcription is very good and the tool well designed: in all transcriptions, no matter how effective, some elements of the transcription may be misspelled or not understandable. The tool allows you, for example, to click and quickly launch the part of the call that is causing problems, which you can then listen to again to complete the transcription. This is just one example.

It then connects with all the telephone customer relations software on the market, provided that it works in stereo. Part of our organisation is equipped with Talkdesk, and another part will soon be equipped with Genesys; in both cases, Callity connects via an API. The dashboards are well designed, as are the statistics, making it a popular and easy-to-use tool for the training and production monitoring teams. The parameters are set by their team, who have a very good grasp of the tool.

In truth, when we discovered it, we said to ourselves: this is the tool we had dreamed of developing. Let's use it instead of trying to design it, especially as it would have taken us a long time. In fast-growing companies, the right allocation of time and resources to key issues is a cornerstone of success.

In what context do you use it?
BD: For the moment, we're just transcribing and listening to call sequences that have led to sales. The aim is to gain a better understanding of the kinematics, identify training options and check compliance. For example, to ensure that a mandatory and legal element is present, such as information about the possibility of recording the conversation.

You mustn't forget that when you systematically analyse conversations and the data they produce, the benefits come from the actions you take afterwards. A tool is still a tool. But we plan to extend it to other points in the customer journey.

Systematically listening to and analysing conversations is almost... a drug. I haven't given it up, although I'd like to have more time to devote to it.

In 2023, Julia and Ugip joined Santiane, a broker with turnover of more than €100 million and insurance cover for 650,000 people. It has recently expanded its business to include other insurance products, such as loan insurance and non-life insurance.